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Introduction

Firebase is Google’s mobile platform that helps you develop high-quality apps and grow your business. In this tutorial, you will make good use of one of Firebase’s awesome features: the Realtime Database.

You will build a single page application to create books. This book will be saved to your Firebase database, and you will be able to retrieve and delete books you have created.

Let’s get started.

Set Up Firebase

Go to Google’s Firebase page to create a new account. When done with that, log in to your console. Click on the option to add a project. Enter your project details and click on the button CREATE PROJECT.

This will lead you to your console. The Firebase console helps you manage your Firebase configuration settings.

For this tutorial, you’ll need to make access to your database public. From the panel on the left, select Database. Select Realtime Database from the options that show next by clicking GET STARTED. Making your database public involves editing the rules. So click RULES on the page that loads next.

Make your rules look like this.

{
"rules": {
".read": true,
".write": true
}
}

Click the option to PUBLISH when done.

With this rule, authentication is not required to perform read and write actions on your database. This is needful for the application you will be building in this tutorial.

Set Up a Project Using Vue CLI

Vue CLI allows you to scaffold Vue.js projects. If you do not have it on your machine, you can get it by running:

npm install -g vue-cli

This will install it globally on your machine. Here is how Vue-CLI is used.

Set Up the Firebase Connection

Go to your Firebase console, and click on the Overview link on the left panel. Select the option to add Firebase to your web app. Copy the snippet that pops up in the window to a text file. The snippet contains your apiKey, authDomain, databaseURL, projectId, storageBucket, and messagingSenderId. You need these details to be able to access your Firebase database.

You start by importing Firebase from the core Firebase library. A Firebase instance is created using the initializeApp method. The snippet you copied has to be passed to this method as an object. This has to be done in the script section of your App.vue, like this.

Deleting Books

Let’s put in place a method that gets called each time the button is clicked. The method is passed the book you intend to delete, which is actually the key to the book, as you will see soon. The remove() is called on the returned book to delete it from the database.

Here is what the method looks like.

removeBook: function (book) {
booksRef.child(book['.key']).remove()
}

With that, you are done with App.vue. Putting everything together, here is how your App.vue file should look.

Conclusion

JavaScript has become extremely popular and is now capable of building mature applications (as we’ve seen above). If you’re looking for additional resources to study or to use in your work, check out what we have available in the Envato Market.

In this tutorial, you learned about Firebase. You were able to connect Vue.js and Firebase using VueFire. Your application can make read and write requests to your Firebase database.

You can go further by adding more features like categories and description.